> There were websites which aggregated downloads of keygens for various games. These worked more often than you would expect.

What did I expect? The "warez = trojan" thing is mainly corporate propaganda. Commercial products are just as likely to contain malware.

> Alcohol 120% was the free tool of choice to emulate a CD drive for ISOs of games which required the CD to be inserted for copy protection, or rip a CD for that purpose. This only became popular once hard drives became big enough for people to spend many gigabytes imaging their CDs.

Actually, it was Daemon Tools :^)